


It never rains in southern california

by adreadfulidea



Series: like our ghosts will live [1]
Category: Mad Men
Genre: Author's Favorite, Bad Ideas, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 13:35:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5092679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreadfulidea/pseuds/adreadfulidea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first thing Megan did after she got her divorce settlement all squared away legally was buy a house.</p><p>The second thing she did was fill it with people she didn’t much like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It never rains in southern california

**Author's Note:**

> I'm writing a cute AU where they're all supportive and adorable, so of course my subconscious demanded a story where they act like human tire-fires instead.

 

Megan was in the diner because she had wanted to get away from home; it was the kind of place no one she knew was going to go. She needed the time alone and she could put up with burned coffee for that.

Michael was there because he worked as a dishwasher.

She saw him from behind at first. He was standing outside taking a break - not smoking, he hadn’t picked up the habit since they last spoke - but looking up at the sky, watching the clouds. The window was slightly filmy with soap that hadn’t been cleaned off properly. She shuffled closer to it, wondering why the shape of those shoulders, that curly dark hair was so familiar to her.

He coughed and turned his head towards her. They both froze like rabbits.

She knocked on the window, playfully. He didn’t smile or anything, just stared; it was weird for a guy who had always been so expressive.

Then he came back inside and headed for her booth. At least he didn’t try and ignore her.

“Hey,” she said. “What are you doing out here?”

“I work here,” he said. He was wearing a white t-shirt with an apron and he was clean-shaven again. She was glad of that, she didn’t know what he’d been thinking with that stupid mustache.

“I guessed as much,” she said. “I meant in California.”

He shrugged. “Maybe I got sick of the snow.”

“Am I interrupting something?” she asked. She thought it might be nice to catch up, but he didn’t look like he wanted to talk to her at all. “I assumed you were taking a break.”

“I am,” he said. He glanced back in the direction of the kitchen, like he was considering walking away or making an excuse. But he didn’t. Instead he slid into the booth across from her.

There was something changed in him but she couldn’t put her finger on it. He wasn’t thinner or heavier, he hadn’t gotten glasses or grown a beard. He wasn’t wearing any product in his hair the way he did before but that wasn’t enough of a difference to account for her noticing.

“Heard you got divorced,” he said, which was an interesting opening volley.

“All official and everything.” She held up her wedding band-free hand. There was still a lighter strip of skin where the ring had been. “What have you been up to?”

“Nothing worth talking about.”

The brusque answers were irritating, but more than that they were worrisome. He never used to have a problem carrying on a conversation. Back when they worked together he could talk the hind leg off a cat. Some days they would sit on the floor of the office during lunch, eating greasy chinese out of cartons - Megan veering wildly off whatever diet plan she was supposed to be on - and hang out for the whole hour. She’d liked it.

“Listen,” she said, because she thought she knew the source of the problem. “Michael. I know about what happened to you, so you don’t have to -”

“Right,” he said abruptly, and stood up. He was very pale. “I better get back to work. It was nice seeing you again. I’d prefer it if you didn’t tell anyone you ran into me.”

“ _What_?” she asked. “Hold on a minute!”

But he had already turned his back on her, stiff and unyielding -

(And that was the difference, she realized; he was so tense. He carried himself like it hurt.)

\- and he disappeared into the kitchen without another word.

 

The first thing Megan did after she got her divorce settlement all squared away legally was buy a house.

The second thing she did was fill it with people she didn’t much like.

Her house was in Laurel Canyon. It wasn’t enormous - she didn’t want some kind of mansion. It had three bedrooms, a flat roof and huge windows overlooking the backyard. There was a stone fireplace in the living room and a meditation pool in the far corner of the yard, the kind people put water lilies and goldfish in.

She had loved the house when she bought it. She still did. But she hadn’t counted on being lonely.

Megan convinced herself that she had won. She had a house and a life in a beautiful city and Don had - Don was - she didn’t want to think about what Don was doing. She didn’t want to think about him ever again.

But it was his money that bought the house she lived in - wasn’t it his? Or had she earned it, payment for his sins?

If she was working -

(This is all I’m good for, she’d sobbed in a dark bedroom after her mother called her a bitch.)

But she wasn’t.

The last audition she went to ended unceremoniously when the casting director asked how old she was. She found herself tripping over an ineffective lie that somehow turned into the truth. He hadn’t been cruel. No, he had been sympathetic and that was worse. That was humiliating.

“Sweetheart,” he’d said, “I don’t mean to insult you - you’re a very, very pretty girl. But there’s only so long you can call yourself a girl and believe it. There’s no shame in being a grown woman, no matter what this town tries to tell you. These ingenue roles aren’t for you anymore.”

So she said: thank you. You’ve been very honest. She left the room with her chin up.

And then she had cried in the car for twenty minutes.

 

Megan fired her agent. She hired a new one. She fired him, too. At three in the morning she woke up reaching for someone who wasn’t there. At three in the morning she sat in her backyard and drank a bottle of wine.

Her chest seemed to seize up with panic for no reason. She distracted herself with men; she distracted herself with women. Waking up in strange beds became commonplace. Most of the time she fucked people and struggled to remember their names by the next morning. She tried getting high and she tried staying sober. Nothing changed.

Finally, she understood Don. In the worst possible way she understood him. Neither of them could be happy, she decided. No wonder she chose him for a husband.

It was easier with people around. She could forget for a little while, over a drink or a joint. She had extra bedrooms, so she let them stay. Everyone knew she had money, so she gave out loans. Until they weren’t loans anymore, they were gifts, because she knew she wouldn’t be paid back. Megan the millionaire asking for her money back. No, she couldn’t do that.

Algae scummed up the pool in the backyard as dandelions overtook the lawn. Megan stopped picking up after everyone and didn’t hire a maid. The dishes piled up in the sink. She only washed one when she needed to eat from it, and then she would put it right back in.

No one offered to help, but she didn’t expect them to. It was her house.

There was always someone else there. She didn’t even bother keeping track of them anymore. Complete strangers making out on her couch while she rummaged through the kitchen wondering who moved the sugar. Someone’s guru sleeping under the car park because he thought staying indoors would interfere with enlightenment. Apparently he thought bathing would interfere with enlightenment as well.

“You’re going to get murdered by a cult lunatic,” her mother said, furious, during their most recent phone call. She wouldn’t visit anymore. “Stop this immediately.”

Well. It was nice to know that she cared.

Megan developed a habit of driving around all night. She didn’t want to be in the house; someone was playing music too loud and she had a headache. Or they were burning incense that made her cough. Her skin itched, she was so uncomfortable - she had to wear herself out somehow. The freeway unfurled for her like a black ribbon. She followed it until her eyes burned and the sun started to crack the dark apart. At five or six in the morning she fell into her bed and passed out until noon.

All things considered, it almost made sense when she started following Michael Ginsberg around.

 

But of course Megan never intended to do any such thing. What she wanted was to apologize, or to check if he was okay, or maybe just prove to herself that someone _could_ be okay after everything, that they could become themselves once more.

She went back to the diner. There were two men standing by a propped-open door in the back of the building, smoking cigarettes. Cooks, judging by their stained aprons.

“Hi,” she said. “Is Michael Ginsberg in today?”

The man who was closest to her exhaled smoke. A line appeared between his eyebrows. “Who?”

Oh god, Megan thought. I made him quit. I cost him his job.

But she tried again. “Short,” she said, “with black hair. Came here from New York? He has an accent like Bugs Bunny.”

“Ah,” the guy said. “I got it. You mean Mike Greenbaum. Does the dishes, right? He switched to the night shift.”

She was relieved to hear that she hadn’t chased him out of town, and she knew that changing shifts meant he was avoiding her and she should leave him alone. But when she went for her drive that night she found herself parked outside the diner without a clear idea of how she’d gotten there.

The restaurant wasn’t busy at such a late hour. A small neon sign that said ‘Open 24 hrs’ hummed in the corner of the window - the ‘n’ had died and the ‘4’ was going. Customers came and went. Truckers in ballcaps, a cop who had an enormous plate of hashbrowns, a drunk couple that got into a fight and left in separate directions. The nighttime people. Megan stayed in the car.

She chewed her nails and waited until Michael came out. He walked with his head down and never looked in her direction; the wind was picking up and it pushed his hair around. Megan told herself that she would go over and offer him a ride home and they would have a normal conversation. Instead he got into an ancient pickup that looked like it could have carried the Clampett family to California and she tailed him out onto the road.

She was going to turn back at the first light, and then the next one. Once she saw his arm come out to adjust the mirror and thought that she had been spotted. But when he didn’t slow down or try and lose her she kept going until she was watching him pull up to a fleabag motel.

He didn’t go into the lobby and he already had keys, so he must have been staying there for a while. His room was on the upper level. The paint on his door was flaking off and one of the numbers had flipped upside down.

He went inside and a light turned on. She left before he could go to the window and see her.

 

The next day she could just about convince herself that it had never happened. Megan wouldn’t do something like that. No, never.

She would call her mother. Marie and Roger were renting an apartment in Paris; she would go stay with them. She loved Paris when she went there with her family when she was young. The house could be left behind; she didn’t care about it. The squatters could have it. They never noticed when she left anyway. Marie would be sympathetic yet condescending and Roger would make terrible stepfather jokes. It would be okay.

Neither of them was home when she called. Megan hung up the phone and found a girl she didn’t recognize kneeling in front of the coffee table. She was tapping out lines of cocaine.

“Hi,” the girl said. “You want some?”

“No,” Megan said. She could feel pressure building behind her eyes. “Have we met?”

“Don’t think so,” the girl said. “I’m Emily, Alan’s girlfriend.”

Alan was sleeping off a hangover in one of the bedrooms. There was a girl named Samantha in there with him.

“You’re Maggie, right?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” Megan said. She walked out the front door and got in her car.

 

Michael didn’t go out much in the week Megan followed him. He got groceries at the corner store, but not many. He ate at a taco stand in his neighborhood twice. When he did his laundry he read a paperback while waiting at the laundromat and got through most of the book. She hadn’t known he could read that fast.

He didn’t go to any bars or liquor stores. Any conversations he had were brief. His light was often on for hours after he got back to his room but no one ever visited him.

After that first night Megan tried to stay out of his direct line of sight. The ragtop was always up. She kept to the other side of the parking lot when she was at the motel, preferably hidden by another car. That made it hard to tell what was going on. She saw him get out of his truck and lean back against it. He turned away from her and fiddled with something - the door handle, maybe.

She closed her eyes. God, she was so tired. She almost wished that the motel manager would come out and tell her to get the hell off his property. That would put a stop to all of this.

Someone tapped on the passenger-side window and she screamed.

It was, unsurprisingly, Michael. He indicated she should roll the window down.

It took her a minute to do it. She was too busy trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for her behavior. Since there wasn’t one she did as he asked.

“Nice car,” he said, and leaned inside. He put his palm flat to the leather of the seat, testing its softness. “Pretty conspicuous in this neck of the woods.”

Megan put her burning face in her hands. She was so fucking stupid.

“Is there something you wanted?” he asked. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

_I’d prefer if you didn’t tell anyone you ran into me._

“I don’t recall owing you money,” he continued. “But there are a lotta things I can’t remember these days, so who knows.”

“Does your Dad know where you are?” Megan asked.

He went completely still. She had never seen him look so angry - she didn’t know he _could_ look that angry.

“ _Goodbye_ , Megan,” he said, and ducked back out.

She threw open her door. “Michael, wait!”

“Fuck off.”

All at once Megan was furious. It seemed to be rolling of her in waves. She jerked to her feet and slammed the car door behind her. “Sure thing, _Mike Greenbaum_.”

He had been walking up the stairs to his room and stopped in his tracks. “I can call myself whatever I want,” he said, looking back over his shoulder.

“That’s always the excuse, isn’t it?” she snapped, stomping up behind him. “Call yourself whatever you want, walk away whenever you want -”

“Oh for - it’s none of your fucking _business_ ,” he said. They were at his door and he jammed the keys in the lock. The knob creaked when he turned it. He didn’t try to keep her out. “This has nothing to do with you. We aren’t even friends -”

“You left your friends behind!” Megan was blind to the details of the room. She was swept away, pacing the length of the floor because she had to do something. She had to move. “You left everyone behind! You think this is going to _help_?”

“Incredible,” he said. “I can’t believe this. I’m sure what I need to hear is this - this bullshit moralizing lecture from you -”

“At least I tried!” she yelled. “At least I didn’t run away like a fucking _coward_!”

“Get out,” he said, and pointed toward the door. It had swung shut while they were arguing. “Get the fuck out of my room.”

She was so _sick_ of men telling her what to do.

“No,” she said. Their faces were inches apart, noses almost touching. She wanted - she wanted -

She kissed him, hard, pulling him to her by the front of his shirt.

“What,” he panted against her mouth. “Jesus Christ, and people say _I’m_ crazy.”

She did it again. He trembled and she wondered how long it had been since anyone touched him.

His hands were on her hips. She took one of them and slid it under the neckline of her blouse, over the thin lace of her bra. His fingers were rough from so much hot water and soap and they felt fantastic.

“Please,” she said.

They didn’t make it to the bed.

 

“Faster,” Megan whined. “You, _oh_ -” She squeezed her legs tighter around his waist. “Michael. _Michael_.”

“No,” he said, and kissed her. She growled and bit his lower lip.

He rocked into her slow and easy; taking his time - and she came like that, shivering apart underneath him.

But he didn’t stop. “I bet,” he said, his voice showing the strain, “I bet if I keep going I can make you beg -”

“Oh my god,” she said, her fingers digging into his lower back.

 

Afterwards they dragged a sheet down off the bed and stayed on the floor. She sat with her back to the mattress and let it pool across her lap; he lay under it and stared upwards.

“I have no idea what just happened,” he said, and touched a small cut on his bottom lip with his thumb. It was from her. She didn’t know whether to be proud or guilty.

“Neither do I,” she told him, unconcerned. She craved a cigarette but she had forgotten them at home.

The room was cleaner than she would have expected. There was a kitchenette with a gas range and a mini fridge. He had a stack of books on the nightstand - one of them, a Ray Bradbury, was open and placed face down. It looked like he was a few chapters from the end.

It wasn’t the room of someone who had given up, she thought, but of a person who was trying very hard. Not like her house in the hills, all but abandoned.

“What did you mean before?” she asked. “When you said there were things you couldn’t remember?”

“Two months, give or take,” he said, flatly. “Which is a low estimate. Maybe there was more, it’s hard to keep track. I think it was whatever they were giving me at the institution. I don’t even remember being admitted. Fuck, I couldn’t remember my own _name_. It’s like I wasn’t even there. All that time I’m never going to get back.”

“That’s a terrible thing to do to somebody,” said Megan. “That’s awful.”

“It’s over with,” he said. “There’s nothing I could have done. You don’t get to say no in places like that.” His closed his eyes, and his voice turned wistful. “I wish I’d seen them land on the moon. I was looking forward to it.”

Megan had watched the moon landing alone. She had friends who threw parties for the event but she hadn’t wanted to go.

“It made me feel small,” she said. He didn’t say anything at all.

“I’m sorry I followed you tonight,” she said. “I can’t explain it, I just - I wanted to be around someone who knew me.”

“Not just tonight,” he said. “I saw you the whole time. That car sticks out like a sore thumb.”

She looked down at him, startled. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Why do I do anything?” He wrapped the sheet around his waist as he stood up, like a towel after the shower.

“You are aware I’ve seen everything,” she said. She didn’t make any attempt to cover herself.

“You hungry?” he asked. “I’ll cook something if you want.”

“Bacon?”

“No bacon,” he said. “What about a grilled cheese?”

“That works,” she said. “For the first course.”

He laid out some bread and cheese and lit a match for the burner. “What’s the second?” he asked without turning around.

“Payback,” she said - no, _promised_ \- and watched the back of his neck turn red.

 

The cocaine cowgirl was asleep on the couch when Megan got back. Her boyfriend had taken off yesterday and she’d moved on to acid. Megan shook her by the shoulder until her eyes popped open.

“You need to leave,” Megan said. “Everyone has to leave.”

She went through every room in the house, rousting the slumbering and the conscious alike until she had kicked all of them out. Her driveway was full of cabs. She paid them herself; it was worth it.

After they had gone she found a mop and some cleaning rags. She scrubbed the place down for hours; everything smelled like bleach, including her. Her manicure was ruined forever.

The kitchen was usable again so she had the bacon she’d wanted earlier for breakfast. Outside her gleaming windows the sunrise turned the sky rose-pink. It was beautiful.

She thought that she might call Michael later, if she wanted. Or go to his door, and knock, and ask to be let in. She could do that - she could do anything. It was a whole new day.

 

 


End file.
